by Kate Moore
“He’s lived here for twenty years.”
Findlater shook his head. “He ain’t in the books, so to speak, ain’t in the parish registry. He’s a vagrant is what he is, miss. He must go to his own parish if he needs alms. He can’t be taking food out of the mouths of St. Botolph’s people.”
“You’re misinformed, Mr. Findlater, if you think Adam depends on parish charity. Adam earns his keep. He has been employed at the inn for years and makes it his home.”
“Begging your pardon, miss, he’s a public nuisance. Look where I found him—halfway to the door. Can’t let his sort wander the high street. He needs minding. If you can’t do it, miss, they’ll do for him in the madhouse.” Findlater looked at her pinny with its stains of gravy and currant jelly.
“No. Adam stays. He lives here. The inn people will look out for him.” Lucy looked around for Frank Blodget in the tap, but he wasn’t there. No one in the common room met her eye.
Findlater smirked.
The front door opened, and in strode Harry Clare. He shed his coat and hat before he saw her then stopped, looking down on the scene, his scarlet jacket bright in the late afternoon gloom. The bench sitters called out to him, and Findlater turned for a moment.
Lucy took advantage of the distraction the captain made to step forward and reach for Adam’s left hand, taking it in hers and pulling gently. Adam’s hand shook in Lucy’s. “I’m responsible for Adam. I’ll see to him,” she told Findlater.
“Not so fast, miss. How can you mind him and keep the inn? Supposing yer madman slips out while you’re putting on the supper? Supposing he has one of his fits and does a mischief to a passenger? How’s Sir Geoffrey to like that, eh?”
Lucy wanted to say that such a thing could never happen. A brief thought crossed her mind at Findlater’s reference to putting supper on for the stage passengers. She did not recognize the man but wondered if he had been there or had heard about the incident. “I will take all precautions.”
“Trouble, Miss Holbrook?” Harry Clare’s voice caused the parish overseer to twist and look over his shoulder. He still had a hand on Adam’s arm.
The captain came down the three wide steps with an unhurried stride. He stopped between Findlater and the stairs a couple of feet from Adam and his would-be abductor. For a moment the two men looked at each other. The captain’s height and breadth of shoulder put a distinct obstacle in Findlater’s path.
Findlater cleared his throat. “And you are?”
“Captain Clare, a friend of Adam’s. If Miss Holbrook takes responsibility for Adam, your work is done. Best to go on about your other duties.”
Again Findlater shook his head. “Now, Captain. You know I’m just doing my job. I can’t be making exceptions for pretty misses and the gentlemen what are sweet on them.”
“New to your job, aren’t you? Who pointed out Adam to you?”
Findlater’s gaze shifted. “Nobody tells Obadiah Findlater his duty.”
“Someone did. Someone told you to come after Adam. Who set you after a harmless old man minding his own work?”
Findlater glanced around at the onlookers and shifted from one foot to the other, tightening his grip on Adam. He thrust out his chin. “No one set me onto him. Just doing my duty as every man must.”
“Consider it done then, and let Adam return to his work. Unless you want to explain your sudden interest in Adam to his friends here at the inn.” Harry Clare nodded to the bench sitters.
“Here, here, Captain,” cried a voice from the crowd.
For a moment Findlater wavered. Lucy thought his nose actually did twitch. He looked past the captain toward the door. He looked at the bench sitters. Then he flung Adam’s arm aside and strode off. As the door banged shut behind him, a cheer went up and pint pots thumped the tables.
Lucy took Adam by the hand and led him back to his bench. She settled him there with his polish pot and his rags. Queenie jumped down from the mantel and brushed against Adam’s leg, and he reached a hand down to stroke the cat’s back. Lucy picked up the fallen candlesticks, conscious of laughter and talk from the bench sitters, who seemed to hail Harry’s victory over Findlater as their own, and in which the captain’s voice sounded a deeper, more subdued note. The smell of burnt sugar coming from the kitchen made her squeeze Adam’s shoulder and dash for the cake she had left in the oven.
* * * *
Harry momentarily considered the usefulness of a partner like Nate Wilde. It would be easy for the youth to slip out after Findlater and trail the man to wherever he went to report on his failure. Harry waited for the laughter at Findlater’s expense to subside. When the conversation returned to its usual topics, he went in search of Lucy.
“Findlater will be back, you know. A man like him doesn’t forget a public humiliation. And whoever put him up to going after Adam won’t be satisfied with today’s result.”
“What do you mean ‘whoever put him up to it’?”
“Did it never occur to you that your father was hiding Adam?”
“From whom?”
“From whoever harmed him, blinded him.”
“But that was long ago. Adam has lived here in peace for twenty years. Why would that change now?”
“Are you sure that when Adam cries out in his distress that what he says is meaningless?”
“You ask hard questions, Captain.”
“You want to protect him, don’t you?”
“But Adam goes nowhere, and no one in the inn means him any harm. They may laugh, but they are used to Adam’s ways. Oh, you mean a stranger.”
“Think. Did anyone new see Adam’s outburst on Sunday?”
“Now you are insulting. My friends are ladies, and they would not involve themselves with someone like Findlater.”
“Someone did.”
She appeared to consider it. “There was a guest Monday who skipped, a gentleman, Hannah said. He ordered the fish, but left without eating or paying.”
* * * *
It was late when Harry returned to the inn. A few lamps remained lit. The doors and shutters had not yet been closed. Lucy and Adam occupied the usual bench at the back of the common room. Adam leaned against the tall back of the bench, his mouth slightly open, his breathing regular, the cat curled in his lap. Lucy slumped forward onto the table, her head resting on an open ledger. The cook’s desertion had helped Harry’s cause by exhausting the girl.
He closed a fist around the keys hanging from a brass ring at her waist and cut the ring free of its ribbon tie. The cat blinked at him, but neither the girl nor the old man stirred. Harry summoned Hannah the maid.
He handed the sleepy girl Lucy’s keys. “Open your mistress’s door, put a lamp on in her room, and report back to me.”
Hannah blinked at him, but turned to do as he’d asked.
Harry stood for a minute listening to her tread on the stairs. Somewhere above the guest chambers were smaller rooms for maids and one for Lucy herself. He’d spent more than a fortnight trying not to think about Lucy Holbrook’s bed. Now it was his duty to place her in it. He grinned. Not all duties were unpleasant.
Hannah returned with a curtsy and the keys. Harry gave her a coin for her trouble, which brightened her look. “Are you ready for your next assignment?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Good. I’m putting you on sentry duty. You’re to sit with Adam on his bench while I take Miss Holbrook up to her room. Can you do it?”
Hannah glanced warily at the sleeping Adam and swallowed. She looked as uncertain as the rawest recruit hearing big guns for the first time. At last she nodded.
“You can do it, Hannah. A quarter of an hour, no more.”
She put her coin in a pocket and settled on the bench beside Adam. Harry turned to Lucy. What little light glowed from a few candles and a low fire seemed to find her golden head and ma
ke it shine.
An effective officer is an efficient officer. Harry repeated the line to himself as he lifted her arms and head from the table, swung her feet to the floor, and caught her up in his arms, her head resting against his chest. She was as curved and soft and warm and womanly as he’d guessed from his stolen glances of her across the inn. The scent of her hair and skin made his head swim briefly.
Harry had moved wagons up mountainsides in the mud. He had moved horses across rocky gorges of rushing streams. He had moved men forward in the face of withering French fire. Now he had only to move one sleeping woman to her bed.
He repeated the line about efficiency many times as he made his way up two flights of stairs to her room. The door was open, and Hannah’s lamp on the mantel illuminated a small, neat room, softened by feminine touches. He lowered them onto the canopied bed with its virginal muslin hangings.
He settled the girl on his lap, leaning her forward against one arm, so that he could work the buttons on the back of her gown. The tiny buttons covered in the fine black wool of the gown and the weight of soft breasts against his arm and bottom in his lap interfered with the steadiness of his fingers.
“Almost there,” he whispered to the girl as he spread the sides of the gown, pushing it down off her shoulders.
It stymied him a moment that her stays closed in the front. She was a practical woman, after all, not a fine lady with a maid to lace her up. So he stood and turned and laid her out on the bed. He looked down at the sleeping girl, but he wasn’t about to retreat now with the job half done. With sudden efficiency, he lifted her skirts, dispensed with her shoes, pulled the black gown down over her hips and legs, untied her petticoats and stripped them away, too.
Now she lay before him in plain fine cotton so sheer it gave the illusion of a mere veil over the sweet soft curves and shadows of her that he wanted to touch. His twelve years of soldiering had come to nothing more than a few relics in a glass case, yet he did not regret his time in the army. Whatever the harsh lessons of war, the army had also refined his senses, taught him nuances. He had learned to quiet every competing thought so that he might suck the pleasure from a rare moment of peace, like watching a sleeping girl.
But Tom Holbrook’s solid bulk no longer stood between Lucy and himself, so he took a step back from the bed, tossed her discarded garments on a chair by the hearth, and allowed himself one last look before he drew the white counterpane over the sleeping girl.
He turned to put out the lamp and saw the portrait of a picnicking lady on the wall above the small hearth. Even in the dim light of a single lamp, the portrait was striking in its overlarge size and its subject, surely remote from the girl. Harry did not recognize the lady, but he was sure he knew the house, that he’d been to that house, in his youth, perhaps when he was thirteen or so and tagging after Richard on some shooting expedition. The name of the place would come to him. He put out the lamp. His mission, for better or worse, was to get the old man’s information. So he would leave Lucy Holbrook to her dreams and rouse tall, lanky Adam and help him through his nighttime ritual. He shut the door and descended the stairs.
He found Hannah awake and edgy. He thanked her, gave her a coin for her trouble, and sent her off to bed.
He put a hand on Adam’s shoulder and spoke to him as Lucy would. After a minute the old man stirred, and Queenie jumped from his lap.
“You like cats very much,” Adam said to him.
“I do,” said Harry. “Let’s get you to bed, Adam.”
Harry helped Adam to his feet, put the old man’s hand on his shoulder, and turned them toward the passageway to Tom Holbrook’s room.
Together they shuffled down the passageway. Harry used Lucy’s key to open the door and made Adam stand in the doorway while Harry lit a lamp, conscious of how easy it was for him to go from darkness to light, how the room sprang into view at the flaring of the wick, while nothing changed for the old man.
Adam talked of Tom Holbrook while Harry helped the old man remove his clothes and shoes and put on a long nightshirt. The old man’s slow deliberate attention to each step of the process allowed Harry to study the room again. If Tom Holbrook had kept any clues to Adam’s past, a likely place was the locked bottom drawer of the wardrobe.
“Mr. Tom dead?” Adam asked.
“He is,” Harry agreed.
“Tonight, Captain Clare guard?” The old man’s voice was worried.
“Yes, Adam. I guard.” Harry thought it an odd choice of word, even for the old man. It was a word that implied a threat.
When at last Adam had stretched out on the bed under the stairs, Harry helped him pull the rug up over him and settled in the armchair.
He envied Adam Pickersgill his apparently dreamless sleep. Whatever troubled the man’s waking mind from time to time in such a terrible way left his unconscious undisturbed. There was no movement from Adam’s bed except the regular rise and fall of his chest with his breathing. He lay as peaceful as a child.
Harry rose from the chair and lit a second lamp, positioning it to illuminate the tall wardrobe with its upper cabinet and lower drawers. There was no mystery in the cabinet, in shirts and coats hanging in neat array. Nor was there anything in the first drawer of the wardrobe but smalls and stockings, gloves and woolen scarves.
If the wardrobe held any information about Adam, it would be in the locked lower drawer. With a bit of guesswork and bit of luck, Harry was able to turn a key in the lock on the third try. The drawer stuck a bit from being full, and Harry worked patiently to pull it out only far enough to examine the contents. The drawer emitted a musty smell of cedar and old things, things that had not breathed in a long time.
On the surface of it, the drawer appeared to hold a jumble of unrelated clothes and books, and yet there was a neat order to the arrangement that spoke of a deliberate effort to preserve the items collected. On the left he found a girl’s sampler in threads of yellow, blue, and green; a child’s slate; and a bundle of letters tied with a cord. The items must have belonged to Lucy and not the old man, who had never learned to read or write. Harry paused and looked around the room for some other likely place where Tom Holbrook might have kept something of Adam’s past.
Nothing else possessed a lock. Harry turned back to the drawer.
He made a note of the arrangement of items and carefully lifted each one from the drawer. Beneath the letter bundle he found an old edition of the peerage, an item that could not have belonged to Lucy. He lifted the book out of its nest of garments and read the date inside the cover. If he looked, he would find his father’s name, and his and Richard’s. Richard’s words about being a dead branch of the family tree came back to him. He thumbed the book for any hint of Tom Holbrook’s reason for keeping it, and it fell open to a page turned down. The entry on two facing pages read:
LYDFORD of Hartwood Park
Edward Lydford, born May 2, 1754, married September 4, 1779, Lady Charlotte Longshaw, daughter of Nicholas Longshaw, by which lady he has issue Penelope, born April 7, 1780; John, January 22, 1782; Henry, November 16, 1785.
Principal seat, Hartwood Park in the county of Leicester.
Heir presumptive: John Nicholas Lydford
As soon as he saw the name, he knew Hartwood was the house in the portrait in Lucy’s room. Hartwood Park was not fifteen miles from Mountjoy. Harry wondered whether John Lydford was still their neighbor. Harry had been allowed to come along one winter when John invited Richard to a shooting party at Hartwood. Penelope Lydford was then being courted in London as a great beauty. Her brother told them with some disgust that his sister was mad for a French count.
Harry closed the book. Lucy’s comment that she thought Adam had been in service came back to him, but if Tom Holbrook had discovered that Adam came from Hartwood Park, why had he not sent Adam back there? Harry set the book on the rug and reached down into the next layer of items in th
e drawer. He found a child’s primer, a book about the adventures of a boy named Tom True accompanied by his friend Prudence, and a box of pencils and chalks. At the very bottom of the drawer was a soft bundle wrapped in thin yellowing crepe. He lifted it out of the drawer and unwrapped the bundle.
On top of the bundle lay a girl child’s white lace cap with one broken string and a single white knitted mitten for a tiny hand. Beneath the lace cap and mitten was a muslin gown also for a young girl. Fine embroidery circled the neck of the gown and continued down the center panel. It was a gown fit for a young princess, but when Harry lifted it, the folds of the gown fell away, and a long brown stain appeared from the center of the gown down to its hem. The stain was one he knew well. He’d buried men who wore that stain on their clothes, but he had never seen it on a child’s garment. He lay the gown aside and looked at the last item in the bundle, a pale blue wool child’s coat with knotted silk embroidery to match the gown, and a blood stain every bit as deep and dark.
Inevitably as the husband hunter prepares for the Season, she thinks first of its delights. She anticipates the thrill of dancing with a desirable partner and the pleasure of a handsome gentleman’s attentions. She is certain of being ready for such happy occasions. But our English weather should teach her to prepare equally for those less happy moments, which are part of every husband hunter’s experience, moments of distress and awkwardness. The most distressing forms of awkwardness arise whenever there is an unequal degree of admiration and regard between two persons. When the husband hunter observes a gentleman, to whom she has made her interest plain, choose another, or when she must meet again a man whom she has refused as a partner in the dance or in life, she must exercise the greatest degree of self-mastery. She must not permit herself to blush. Rather she must exert herself to put the other person at ease. Once she has done so, she will discover how readily her own comfort and hopes are restored.
